There's no critic like a dead critic - a point well proved by this biliously funny adaptation of Thomas Bernhard's 1985 novel about a celebrated music writer, with which the Vienna Burgtheater makes its long-overdue British debut.

What is instantly striking about the piece is its moral ambivalence. And it comes as no surprise to learn that Bernhard, famous for his hatred of all things Austrian, loved to don lederhosen and Tyrolean hat to commute between his various rural properties.

That Janus-faced approach runs right through Alte Meister. It's the story of four biographers competing for the memories of a legendary Viennese music critic, Mr Reger, who spent every other day gazing raptly at Tintoretto's white-bearded man in the Kunsthistorisches Museum.

So is this the indication of an exquisite sensibility? Not really. We learn that Reger regarded the old masters as "global decorators". The real reason for his obsession was that he had met his wife in front of the Tintoretto, and was inconsolable after the death of a woman whom in life he had treated with patronising condescension.

Bernhard's whole approach is to treat Reger both as an object of merciless satire and a vehicle for his own views. Any practising critic will wince when the celebrated taste-maker announces: "I fell into art to escape from life."

Yet Reger also becomes Bernhard's spokesman in his scathing attacks on Austrian nazism and Catholicism, on the modern world's "chronic music consumerism" and, more specifically, on the grossly inadequate lavatories at the Musikverein and the fact that "Vienna has no toilet culture".

The problem with Bernhard's plays is that they often turn into static diatribes. But it's a sign of the success of this adaptation from Stephan Müller and Claudia Hamm that they keep the stage constantly alive.

The attack on Viennese sanitation is, in fact, delivered by one of the four grey-suited actors from the ledge of the Lyceum dress circle. And, throughout, the diverse quartet - Urs Hefti, Hanspeter Müller, Edmund Telgenkämper and Adrian Furrer - metamorphose from Reger's biographers into the man himself as they patrol the elegantly designed stage.

What makes the piece so disturbing is that Bernhard constantly asks, like George Steiner, whether there is any necessary link between high art and moral and political awareness; at the same time he laments that in Austria "The light of culture has gone out".

This is satire underscored with feeling, and a dazzling preface to the eagerly awaited Burgtheater Seagull.